Memories of '68 and the many sides of 'Hair'

By SUSAN PAYNTER, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Updated
10:00 pm PDT, Sunday, April 7, 2002

Back in the day of 1968, long hair was shorthand for where we stood on love and war. Untamed, especially on men, it celebrated all the stuff that made the short hairs so nervous and red around the ears. I'm speaking of the ears they regularly "lowered" with the crew cuts that distinguished them as "real Americans" who backed our boys in Vietnam.

The hairline crack between generations widened to a canyon back when hair could get you beaten up, and spit upon and shouted at as a "draft-dodging commie pinko queer."

It was the year that the now-classic "American Tribal Love-Rock Musical" known as "Hair" opened on Broadway (and the summer I started reporting for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer). Even the staff within the newspaper was divided along sharp cliffs of mutual suspicion back when "never trust anyone over 30" was the catch phrase we laughed at but believed.

Seattleites Shelley Plimpton and Walter Michael Harris were well within the trustable range when they first took the stage and took off their clothes in "Hair." Plimpton was just out of high school and waiting tables in New York's Greenwich Village when she was tapped for the off-Broadway original and then the Broadway play. And Harris was a tender, sweet 16.

Now, with "Hair" set to open at Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre on Thursday night (previews start tomorrow), the new generation of "Hair's" tribe is trusting those two over-30 veterans of a different but not-so-different time to tell them like it was.

"They've asked a lot of questions about both the characters and our own experiences of that time," Plimpton told me. After several plays and movies, she got out of show biz a long time ago. It never pulsed in her blood the way it does in her daughter, actress Martha Plimpton. Or in her ex-husband, former Seattle Repertory Theatre artistic director Dan Sullivan, whom she met while doing "Hair."

Plimpton, who was born in Oregon but grew up in "The Village," now works a day job at Gift Center-Seattle. But she says the revival is bringing a continual reunion with old friends she hasn't heard from in years. And the feelings of the era are rushing back too, at a time when the country is once again waving flags and sending its soldiers to war.

The weird thing to Plimpton is that, 30 years later, when people find out she was first Christine and then the pregnant Jeanie in "Hair" (she was actually pregnant with Martha at the time), the first question they still ask is, "Wow. What was it like getting naked?"

It was voluntary that first time, Plimpton said. Do it or don't, the directors said. But it actually felt kind of good coming just after a raucous, sweaty dance number.

To Harris, crossing the nudity threshold at 16 was especially liberating since, until then, he'd been too self-conscious about the deformity of his limbs from a childhood illness to even go to the beach in a bathing suit.

Now the producing artistic director of ArtsWest in West Seattle, Harris says the seismic events of those days -- and the way they were mourned and celebrated onstage -- clearly shaped who he became. Among the temblors was the assassination of Martin Luther King, shocking everyone while the play was still in rehearsal.

"The minute I was through doing the play, I wanted to board a plane and fly to San Francisco and find a commune," Harris recalled. And that's just what he did.

There he joined his brother, George, who was then known as "Hibiscus" and was already famous as a photographic icon. George was the "flower child" photographed inserting flowers into the barrel of a cop's gun during a demonstration against the Vietnam War. The image joined those of a Vietnamese girl burned by napalm and a woman shrieking at the Kent State shootings to became portraits of polarization and the hope for peace.

"The thing to remember about 'Hair' is that it's not so much about war and flags or nudity as about the exuberance and hopefulness of youth," Harris said. "We could change the world just by wanting it so. That's what we felt."

That's what "Hair," the play, said from the stage back then. And what hair, the stuff, said while it came "streaming, flaxen, waxen" from our heads and legs and (eeuuw) arm pits.